Young Turks

that of national unification gradually assumes the shape of new aspirations towards an equilibrium of power while ethnographic frontiers begin to serve only as a pretext covering hidden tendencies toward hegemony and domination let us now for a time put aside the far-reaching designs of european conquerors and diplomatists in the balkans let us even forget dynastic intrigues favored or hampered by the reigning families of europe let us review the double and elementary process of turkish decay and of national awakening in the balkans what exactly was the principal cause of the destruction of turkey the answer may be partly found in what has been said already but i want to impress it on you by the aid of an english book which according to my view is undeservedly forgotten and which i wish particularly to recall to your minds at the present time i mean professor edward freeman's book on the ottoman power in europe which was written on the eve of the berlin congress of eighteen seventy eight and met at the time with a rather unfriendly reception it might have been written to-day this is what freeman says the presence of the turk in europe is incidental they remain at the end of five hundred years as much strangers as they were at the beginning european ideas and words like nation government law sovereign subject do not apply to them how can they form a nation when the mohammedan part of the population has always been a ruling race and the christian or other non-mohammedan part has always been a subject race the non-musulman subjects of a musulman ruler sink to the condition of a subject people the utmost that the best mohammedan ruler can do is to save his subjects of other religions from actual persecution he cannot save them from degradation he cannot without forsaking the principles of his own religion put them on the same level as musulmans that is why in turkey there can be no subject and no national government when we call an englishman a british subject we mean that he is a member of the british state but if we call a bulgarian an ottoman subject it means that he is the member of a body which is held in bondage by the body of which the ottoman sultan is the head and he is also subject to all the lesser turks as his daily oppressors as far as the turks themselves are concerned the turkish government is a government i e a system of the administration of the law but their rule over the christian is a rule of mere force and not a rule of law the christian is in strictness out of the pale of the law the utmost that he can do is to purchase the security of his life and property and the exercise of his religion by the payment of tribute that is why among the nations of western europe no one wishes to get rid of the government of his country though he may wish to modify and improve it in many ways but the christian subject of the turkish government does not wish to reform the turkish government he simply wishes to get rid of it altogether he wishes to become a member of a political community of his own nation which shall have nothing to do with the turk that power could not redress their grievances because the existence of that power in itself is the greatest of their grievances the root and cause of all lesser grievances the only solution is the transfer of the power of the turk to other hands I have known Turkey for nearly twenty years, and I can give you no better explanation of the real causes of her fatal downfall than that given by the famous English historian.

You will ask me, perhaps, seeing that the book was written in 1878, how it is possible to apply Freeman's statements to regenerated Turkey, the Turkey of to-day, the Turkey of the Young Turks after their revolution of 1808.

Well, there was one moment when I myself had some doubts, and after that a time when I did not wish to play the part of the Birdaville omen.

But when two years had elapsed after the revolution, after this two years' test it became clear, even to those who knew nothing about the internal state of Turkey, that the trial had failed.

This is not a private melancholy.

It is a shared fever among the cadets of his generation, whispered in barracks after lights out, passed hand to hand in banned pamphlets smuggled from Paris and Geneva, printed by exiled dissidents who call themselves Young Turks and dream of a constitution that might yet save the Sultanate from itself.

Mustafa Kemal has already tasted the danger of these ideas.

Two years earlier, as a War College cadet, he and a small circle of friends produced a handwritten newspaper, passed clandestinely among trusted classmates, filled with essays denouncing the corruption of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's court, his network of spies, his strangulation of the press, his fear of his own officer corps.

Before the close of the last century, nationalism had patently passed into Asia.

The Young Turk and the Young Egyptian movements, the nationalist stirrings in Persia and India, and the Chinese Revolution are unmistakable signs that Asia is in the throes of the first phase of national self-consciousness.

But of late years, numerous symptoms proclaim the fact that in Asia also the second or racial stage of nationalism has begun.

This is strikingly illustrated by the recent course of events in the Mohammedan world.

It also does much to explain the recent revolt of the Sharif of Mecca, which today threatens Turkish rule throughout Arabia with complete destruction.

This rapid growth of Arab national consciousness was undoubtedly stimulated by the hostile reaction of the corresponding development which had been taking place in the Turkish world.

We all remember the startling growth of young Turkey, the amazing transformation of the Ottomans from old-fashioned Muslims, docilely submissive to the absolute Sultan Caliph, into self-conscious patriots eager to replace the theocratic despotism of Abdul Hamid by an Ottoman national state with Turkish language and culture supreme over and absorbing all the rest.

That is merely the familiar nationalist first stage.

Before the close of the last century, nationalism had patently passed into Asia.

The Young Turk and the Young Egyptian movements, the nationalist stirrings in Persia and India, and the Chinese Revolution are unmistakable signs that Asia is in the throes of the first phase of national self-consciousness.

But of late years, numerous symptoms proclaim the fact that in Asia also the second or racial stage of nationalism has begun.

This is strikingly illustrated by the recent course of events in the Mohammedan world.

It also does much to explain the recent revolt of the Sharif of Mecca, which today threatens Turkish rule throughout Arabia with complete destruction.

This rapid growth of Arab national consciousness was undoubtedly stimulated by the hostile reaction of the corresponding development which had been taking place in the Turkish world.

We all remember the startling growth of Young Turkey, the amazing transformation of the Ottomans from old-fashioned Muslims, docilely submissive to the absolute Sultan Caliph, into self-conscious patriots eager to replace the theocratic despotism of Abdul Hamid by an Ottoman national state with Turkish language and culture supreme over and absorbing all the rest.

That is merely the familiar nationalist first stage.

that we're not doing this um we're not but but There were a series of wars immediately preceding the First World War.

And one of the outgrowths of that was the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks, revolt

against the Sultan.

No, not Senkweger.

doing yeah yeah yeah that guy turkmenistan is just a very interesting place Um, but yeah, so essentially this treaty, the terms of it, the prospect of it being signed is, is not the only thing.

Um, and in fact, I wouldn't even say it was the proximate cause of this movement.

The Turkish, uh, national movement under Ataturk was, had already been started by this point, but they were watching these kind of a carryover from the young Turks.

Yes, and they were watching these developments very closely, and the prospect of this treaty being signed is one of the motivations to – and this is one of my favorite little niches and nuances of history that I love to talk about – competing dueling governments.

So by the time we reach World War I, uh, I'm jumping ahead here a bit, if I'm allowed, and by the time we reach World War I and the Ottoman Empire enters the war against the Allies on the side of Germany, of course, Russia is on the side of the Allies and against the Ottoman Empire and is of course backing the Armenians.

And the Armeni- the, the Ottoman regime at this point has changed from the Ottomanism autocracy of Abdul Hamid II To the ultra neo-fascist, almost proto-Nazi eugenist nationalism of the Young Turks, who were led by the three Pashas, who were the kind of triumvirate that ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war.

And they believed that war would be a cleansing experience, um, for the Ottoman Empire, and they attacked the Armenian communities.

In the 1890s, the Ottomans...

Nothing happens there unless a Western power makes it happen, and anything that happens there is a reaction to something that a Western power does.

But as you're telling it, the beginning of the cycle of purging, elimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide in, in the Mid- it, it's an int- it's a spontaneous local phenomenon.

It is something driven by the Ottoman Turkish government and their successor, the Young Turk government, which is defining itself in new ways against its subject peoples-

That's right